Mets, Yankees cover their bases

Mar. 31, 2009

Yankees employees have scoured the new Stadium, checking such details as whether Babe Ruth's banner hangs in the right direction. Go to lohud.com for photo galleries of both of the new stadiums. / Ricky Flores/The Journal News

As a new building or stadium or arena is nearing its grand opening, there is a standard test done to make sure that everything is flowing smoothly. While it is not particularly scientific (or dignified), it is critically important all the same, and so it is treated with appropriate reverence. The test is called "the big flush."

It is pretty much exactly what you think it is. At a predetermined time, every single toilet in the place is flushed simultaneously to make sure that the new plumbing system is capable of - how you say - handling such a load without issue.

The Mets brought in a number of willing volunteers to help with their test during a weekend in mid-March, according to senior vice president of marketing and communications David Newman. Thankfully, everything went smoothly. When asked about their trial run, Yankees COO Lonn Trost chuckled and said, "We did ours about a month ago - and everything worked."

"The big flush" is just one of numerous last-minute checks and tweaks being made by the Mets and Yankees as they prepare to open New York's two new baseball stadiums for exhibition games this weekend. The Yankees christen the new Yankee Stadium against the Chicago Cubs on Friday evening, while the Mets mark Citi Field's professional debut with a game against the Boston Red Sox the same night (a St. John's-Georgetown game took place there on Sunday).

With "big flush" tests successfully completed well ahead of time, both teams spent the last few weeks poring over their new parks in search of errors, mistakes and missing pieces: the misspelled sign, the arrow pointing in the wrong direction, the power outlet that wasn't connected, the door without a knob.

"I found a railing that was missing - just wasn't there," Trost said. "It was a box seat without the 'box' completed. We found a seat with the warning (to be aware of flying bats and balls) upside down. Those are the easy ones."

At one point, there was a photo making the Internet rounds that showed a row of seats at the new Yankee Stadium right up against the railing of the upper deck - in other words, a row of seats with literally no leg room. Trost said he's seen the photo and has no idea where it came from. While he hasn't sat in every seat in the Stadium, he has been in every section (more than once) and says the photo was likely a fabrication.

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All the same, the Yankees organized a scavenger hunt for their entire Stadium staff of about 200 a few weekends ago in which the purpose was twofold: Get to know your new office while also looking for things that need fixing.

"I wanted 400 eyes looking at every inch of the place," Trost said. "It's a way to force everyone to walk the entire building."

Mets COO Jeff Wilpon, who has overseen the entire construction of Citi Field, said he's spent much of the past few weeks scouring the new park for any safety concerns. "An uneven area where someone might trip, or a railing that's not in the right place," he said. "Those are the things I'm worried about. The punch-list stuff will get caught and fixed - we want to make sure all our fans are going to be safe when they come here."

There's also the matter of training employees to know the park's ins and outs. At the old Yankee Stadium as well as at Shea, if a fan needed to know where the closest bathroom (or beer stand) was, most workers easily knew the answers - the bathrooms (and beer stands) had been there for years.

At the new parks, there are more amenities, more destinations and more services offered to enhance the fan experience, so there's a lot more knowledge that every employee needs to know.

"We've got 2,700 people working at Citi Field on a game day," Newman said. "At Shea, we had 1,700. And here there are less fans (capacity is about 42,000 compared to 57,000) so we want each person's experience with an employee to be personable and welcoming."

That was a primary motivation for the Yankees' scavenger hunt.

"The scavenger-hunt clues are like, 'What does the sign say on the left side of the bathroom in the left-field upper deck?' " Trost said. " 'How many concession stands are there on the main level?' Then there are prizes for the number of punch-list items each group finds."

Visits to the stadiums last week found both awash in a frenzy of activity, as employees went through last-minute training sessions and cleaning crews worked around the clock to get all the dust up. Then there are the last walkthroughs, when team executives will look for anything missing: a ceiling panel that wasn't installed, an electrical outlet that isn't covered, an exposed piece of wiring that needs to be covered.

These are the final details that need to be taken care of before the curtain goes up.

"Sure there's a lot to do to get ready," Newman said, "but it's exciting work. If you can't get excited about opening a new stadium, when can you?"